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Posted 27 August 2012 - 01:47 AM

I just wanted to point something out in the "Welcome to Pandora" article.

But in the end I cannot know what Jagex are thinking. They don't seem to understand how clans work at all (Mod Cocoa saying that clans are all holed up in their Citadel would confirm that).

The reason Jagex mods believe that only P2P clans are always in their citadel is because RSB clans are very active in citadel/clan wars where as most known clans would rather stick to the wilderness. Since J mods really only care about their own forums the most, that's where they get the majority of their opinions and facts.

Posted 27 August 2012 - 04:58 AM

The Big City article really summed up the past year or so for me in runescape. I assumed it was me just getting older and growing away from the game. Maybe it's just the feeling of nostalgia setting in, but most of my runescape experiences were filled with fond memories of long conversations with random strangers. At least I am not the only one feeling lonely in runescape.

Posted 27 August 2012 - 05:52 PM

While true, I think I also understand WHY they aren't as good as they ought to be...
If they give clans too much benefits, they get the entire non-clan world rioting in fally again... If they give clans only the ever so slight benefit they cant complain that they got nothing, but the non-clan ppl cant argue that its too much either... Hence the weak crap...

Posted 27 August 2012 - 06:27 PM

I can relate to BIG CITY. Often I find myself going about my usual chores & absolutely nobody is talking ( except the spam bots of course ). I try to strike up a conversation with anyone around only to be met with silence. Often it's pretty obvious I'm in the middle of a lot of bots who aren't going to reply & that's just depressing. Last night I was relieved to actually be able to get some people TALKING in the runespan. It really helped to make the hours I spent there finishing off my wicked set go quicker. The previous day it had seemed like it took an eternity to earn those points.

Welcome to Pandora also had some very good points. When the citadels first came out I was able to gather up several of my friends & form a clan. By thanksgiving we had over 50 members & a tier 4 citadel. The whole time though I had to continually hastle people with " Have you gotten in your weekly resourses? We have 2 hrs left & don't even have enough in to pay for the upkeep, please come help!" When Thanksgiving hit & people were offline doing their holiday things it became impossible to muster the manpower to keep the citadel afloat & it soon became locked. Since then I haven't bothered reopening it. Frankly it's just not worth the time , effort & headache to try to maintain it. My clans still going, we chat & help each other out using the chat channel & do the occasional event but we've written the citadel off as useless. The avitar did nothing to change that opinion.

Personally I wish they'd give us some way to turn off those stupid ort drops. I'm fighting, get a kill , go to quickly grab the loot before I'm attacked again & lo & behold I end up with even more useless ort in my pack to have to destroy later.

Posted 27 August 2012 - 06:50 PM

The avatars have become an interesting balancing act for our clan's leadership (admins+), between helping themselves or helping other clan members. They are used primarily (exclusively?) for the experience buff, and typically one is always in our clan's 'home' world.

When I'm on-line and skilling, I now ask in which world the avatars are located, so I can get the 3% bonus if it's available and it's on a world where I won't experience lag.

I thought the first article was written well, and I liked the reference made in the title.

Posted 27 August 2012 - 09:52 PM

I can relate to BIG CITY. Often I find myself going about my usual chores & absolutely nobody is talking ( except the spam bots of course ). I try to strike up a conversation with anyone around only to be met with silence. Often it's pretty obvious I'm in the middle of a lot of bots who aren't going to reply & that's just depressing. Last night I was relieved to actually be able to get some people TALKING in the runespan. It really helped to make the hours I spent there finishing off my wicked set go quicker. The previous day it had seemed like it took an eternity to earn those points.

Welcome to Pandora also had some very good points. When the citadels first came out I was able to gather up several of my friends & form a clan. By thanksgiving we had over 50 members & a tier 4 citadel. The whole time though I had to continually hastle people with " Have you gotten in your weekly resourses? We have 2 hrs left & don't even have enough in to pay for the upkeep, please come help!" When Thanksgiving hit & people were offline doing their holiday things it became impossible to muster the manpower to keep the citadel afloat & it soon became locked. Since then I haven't bothered reopening it. Frankly it's just not worth the time , effort & headache to try to maintain it. My clans still going, we chat & help each other out using the chat channel & do the occasional event but we've written the citadel off as useless. The avitar did nothing to change that opinion.

Personally I wish they'd give us some way to turn off those stupid ort drops. I'm fighting, get a kill , go to quickly grab the loot before I'm attacked again & lo & behold I end up with even more useless ort in my pack to have to destroy later.

Actually, you can. Talk to the Head Guard at the Clan Camp to turn them off.

Posted 29 August 2012 - 09:32 AM

Well, as one of those people who has clan admin status, it fell to me to deal with the Avatar. Most of the time, it isn't too much of a bind, but there has been one positive outcome from the update.

We actually 'see' each other, lol. We've organised bank sitting events, in that we pick a bank to camp at (Edge for smelting, Varrock for smithing, etc), get a bonfire going, do a spot of cooking, bit of fletching, alching or whatever and more of us benefit from the bigger skill boost.

As a clan that is small and struggles to maintain tier six some weeks, it's been a huge boost to the positivity in the clan regarding the citadel.

Like a lot of updates, you get the most out of them if you put more into them.

Posted 29 August 2012 - 10:30 AM

It seems updates intended to have users "socialize" just end up antagonizing them or trivializing the social experience altogether. I enjoyed it when we could form community-based settings without the help of cookie-cutter templates supplied by Jagex to direct our focus. The raw feeling of closeness and community you got from spontaneous ordering to fill in gaps like a player-made Fletching Guild, the face-to-face interaction in banks before the GE. The role-playing. The general fun spirit of the community seems to have seriously deteriorated by this point, in this respect. Subsidizing the social experience with preformulated templates dictating how players should organize really misses the point of community.

In some ways, it has its benefits. The Grand Exchange isn't a bad thing. But it arguably made the act of trading largely impersonal. Note that I'm not saying it made users more anonymous to one another this way. You can socialize with people you know nothing about. That's how community is built: discovering interests and creating an outlet to act upon them. I think that's a fair if somewhat weak definition. I'm not saying it's the de facto process. I think it's certainly an essential element to building meaningful bonds. But Jagex seems to be doing the reverse with "social slayer" and the Clan Camp. It's not about getting to know one another. The focus is more on the task itself with other users' interests remaining firmly incidental.

It's like Jagex is building places merely for people to gather, but not to interact in any meaningful way beyond the bare minimum required for the task. When Clan Camp was released, all I saw were strangers begging one another to join their clan for 100K or more so they could customize their clan cape. Users were seen as commodities to obtain a flashy cape. And you can still do a solo task with tens of people surrounding you. If you're going to have people interact in ways that build a community, at least don't prioritize individual tasks which require limiting user interactions to the bare minimum for the process to function. Friends Chat is successful because people can satisfy a need for social interaction by chatting with others meanwhile grinding away. It's a pretty one-dimensional feature, but it's successful at what it was meant to do.

I think the question is, how do we avoid treating other players as mere cogs in the machine when obtaining our own goals? I don't think the issue is that people aren't worth talking to. I think we're just incentivized to play the game in a way which alienates ourselves from others and gives the impression that meaningful interaction is a worthless pursuit. Even worse, we might internalize this and act as if others don't matter. Then we act rude when we're distracted from a task with an innocent attempt at interaction.

I dunno. Maybe I'm just babbling Socializing and playing the game aren't mutually exclusive concepts. The player-made guilds demonstrated that, at least.

Posted 29 August 2012 - 10:20 PM

I'd like to argue that from its onset, RuneScape was never meant to be a grind-towards-the-top game. It started off as a light game of exploring a new world and having the freedom to do what you like. In fact, players are the ones who took on the mindset of "let's maximize the efficiency of our time here" and players are the ones who started this trend.

That is the point I bring up in the article: It's fine to do your own stuff (maybe you're working with 200+ APM, switching prayers and drinking potions and using familiars, oh my!), but it's good to realize that secluding yourself from the social aspect of the game can lead to the deterioration of the playing experience of others. By "social" aspect, it doesn't necessarily mean clans and clans only. The term 'social' encompasses those new players who haven't got a clue, who need someone to reach out to them.

Thinking back to Croce's article (about Trolls) certainly highlights one of the negative aspects of anonymity. Anonymity can cause people to do stuff they wouldn't do in real life, they insult others, they say hurtful things, they act immaturely, etc. On the other hand, anonymity can be a beautiful thing. I can meet someone on a Slayer task and talk to that person and I won't have the faintest idea who that person is, his/her background, etc. I think this positive aspect of anonymity should be highlighted in the community.

I just don't think RuneScape's interactions should be limited to Friends Chats, existing friends, and clan members. It has the potential for so much more.

Posted 17 September 2012 - 03:55 AM

I'd like to argue that from its onset, RuneScape was never meant to be a grind-towards-the-top game. It started off as a light game of exploring a new world and having the freedom to do what you like. In fact, players are the ones who took on the mindset of "let's maximize the efficiency of our time here" and players are the ones who started this trend.

That is the point I bring up in the article: It's fine to do your own stuff (maybe you're working with 200+ APM, switching prayers and drinking potions and using familiars, oh my!), but it's good to realize that secluding yourself from the social aspect of the game can lead to the deterioration of the playing experience of others. By "social" aspect, it doesn't necessarily mean clans and clans only. The term 'social' encompasses those new players who haven't got a clue, who need someone to reach out to them.

Thinking back to Croce's article (about Trolls) certainly highlights one of the negative aspects of anonymity. Anonymity can cause people to do stuff they wouldn't do in real life, they insult others, they say hurtful things, they act immaturely, etc. On the other hand, anonymity can be a beautiful thing. I can meet someone on a Slayer task and talk to that person and I won't have the faintest idea who that person is, his/her background, etc. I think this positive aspect of anonymity should be highlighted in the community.

I just don't think RuneScape's interactions should be limited to Friends Chats, existing friends, and clan members. It has the potential for so much more.

Beautifully written. I think you and I essentially agree on social potential. My earlier comment expanded on that. I think that the deterioration in the social experience witnessed recently, specifically in RuneScape, can be partly ascribed to updates which incentivize the limiting of social interactions to the bare minimum required for the task. And this is perhaps true of all popular MMOs which rely on producing high-level content to remain profitable (this is where the phenomenon seems to be concentrated, due to the nature of such content). Par for the course, anonymity plays a role in this social disconnect as well, as it mitigates responsibility for actions which would normally be held accountable.

I think that as a phenomenon, a degree of social seclusion seems to be an inevitable stage in an MMO's player's development, as he obtains access to higher level content et al. We should take care not to idealize social interaction to the point where we see disconnect as being inherently harmful, and take care to avoid prioritizing idealistic solutions to problems (as a general guideline. I'm not accusing you of that). The player attitude toward efficiency is a product of the material conditions found within the game. Someone just had to take advantage of it.

It's a trivial point -- all major trends are started in some way by the players. This is largely seen in dicing and other forms of emergent gaming. It was to be expected, especially as the game progressed in terms of content offered, thereby encouraging efficient game-play. I don't think that players should be held responsible for its perceived failures, as it appears to be a systemic quality, not an individual one. Just because RuneScape wasn't intended to focus on grinding in its inception does not mean it couldn't have progressed to this point.

If anything, I think the general attitude toward efficiency (among other hot topics) demonstrates that players can approach the game in both a positive and negative manner. I think it's a balancing act between seclusion and socializing, as you brought up with your example. We have thepotential to interact positively with others. It's up to us, on an individual level, to judge how our actions affect others and follow up on them accordingly -- positive or negative.